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Lady tasting tea
In the design of experiments in statistics, the lady tasting tea is a randomized experiment devised by Ronald Fisher and reported in his book The Design of Experiments (1935).[1] The experiment is the original exposition of Fisher's notion of a null hypothesis, which is "never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation".[2][3] The example is loosely based on an event in Fisher's life. The woman in question, phycologist Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup.
The critical region for rejection of the null of no ability to distinguish was the single case of 4 successes of 4 possible, based on the conventional probability criterion < 5%. David Salsburg reports that a colleague of Fisher, H. Fairfield Smith, revealed that in the actual experiment the lady succeeded in identifying all eight cups correctly. "The Fisher Randomization Test", reprinted with a new preface in Statistical Information and Likelihood : A Collection of Critical Essays by Dr. D. Basu; J. K. Ghosh, editor.
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